No longer taken seriously, we're seeing the last gasp of climate denial groups

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is an anti-climate policy advocacy group in the UK that often releases misleading scientific “reports.” The group also hosts annual lectures, and this year, they booked a room at the Royal Society. Many members of the Royal Society expressed concern that the GWPF would exploit the organization’s credibility, and asked that the event be cancelled.

The Royal Society’s governing council met and decided to allow the event to proceed, for fear that cancellation would give it “an unwarranted higher profile.” As a spokesperson for the Royal Society told DeSmog UK:

The evidence shows us that the earth is warming and that recent warming is largely caused by human activities. Once that is accepted, there is scope for debate on the policy responses and that is the area that the GWPF claims to be interested in.

If the GWPF uses this opportunity to misrepresent the scientific evidence it would undermine the legitimacy of its views on policy responses to climate change.

Ridley’s lecture is a 5,600-word Gish Gallop that would require a novel to fully debunk. However, he condensed his main arguments into four key points that are easily refuted:

Why do I think the risk from global warming is being exaggerated? For four principal reasons.

1. All environmental predictions of doom always are;2. the models have been consistently wrong for more than 30 years;3. the best evidence indicates that climate sensitivity is relatively low;4. the climate science establishment has a vested interest in alarm.

Ridley’s first argument against the dangers of global warming is incredibly ironic. He claims that we have nothing to worry about because previous “environmental predictions of gloom” were wrong. But the reason his cited predictions of danger didn’t come to fruition, in most cases, is because we took action to stop them.

Proposed solutions to global warming involve international agreements and cap and trade or other pollution pricing systems – the same mechanisms that successfully solved these previous environmental threats. Yet Ridley remarkably uses those threats as examples in his argument against taking similar steps to address the threats posed by climate change. It defies logic.

Ridley’s climate sensitivity cherry picking

Joanna Haigh, Royal Society fellow and council member, told DeSmog UK of Ridley’s of third key argument:

Ridley claims not to dispute the science, he then disputes climate sensitivity estimates with selective citations.

This is a nice way of saying that Ridley cherry picks the evidence he prefers and ignores the rest. Cherry picking is one of the five telltale techniques of science denial. Being a self-described “lukewarmer” like Ridley generally means believing that the climate is relatively insensitive to the increased greenhouse effect, and that climate change is therefore of little concern. In his talk, Ridley claimed:

recent attempts to measure the sensitivity of the climate system to carbon dioxide using real data nearly all find that it is much lower than the models assume.

In short, Ridley cherry picks the few papers that support his preferred position, neglects to mention that subsequent research has identified flaws in those studies, and ignores the vast body of research contradicting his beliefs.

Conspiracy theories

Ridley’s fourth key argument, and a theme throughout his talk, exemplifies another telltale sign of science denial – conspiratorial thinking. He accuses climate scientists of having “vested interests,” of delaying publication of their results (refuted by the accused scientists here), of deleting and “mysteriously…adjusting” inconvenient data, and so on.